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Background

I am a meteorology graduate student, and I must admit to a rather typical "story" behind that: a series of childhood experiences with extreme weather. My first hurricane was Hurricane Florence of 1988, which made landfall on the Gulf Coast while my family and I were on vacation there. I was four years old, but I was not afraid of it; in fact, the unusual cloud patterns were interesting.

My interest in weather took a jump with the year 1992. A deadly F3 tornado struck my county in spring, Hurricane Andrew made its second landfall and brought further bad/interesting weather, and in November, an F4 tornado hit an area in my state and received a vast amount of coverage for the damage and fatalities that it caused. Having learned that bad weather can kill people, I developed a fear of phenomena such as tornadoes, but the fear could not dispel the underlying fascination.

Through the 1990s with the beginning of a new active multidecadal phase in the Atlantic, I started following news about hurricanes very closely. In 1999, with Hurricane Floyd, I would get up at 6:00 in the morning so that I would be able to read about the hurricane without being late for school. Since then I have kept up with these things and accumulated quite a lot of data about them.

In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan passed over my area as a tropical storm; it had already paid its visit to the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida. But -- I had tracked it long before that. In a twisted way, I'd been hoping for a Category 5 hurricane this year, but hoping that it didn't hit at that intensity. And, it would seem that Ivan kept most of its Category 5 winds to itself.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina passed over my area as a Category 1 hurricane. I feel fortunate, considering what happened to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, where it hit as a strong Category 4, close to a 5. That hurricane is now considered either the worst or second-worst (to the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900) natural disaster to befall the United States. I have updated a couple of pages in this section to account for this hurricane. Katrina information is all over the Internet, including my non-meteorology blog. I highly doubt I will have a section about this storm.

Synoptic Flow Weather Blog

I have a weather-related blog that is entirely separate from my PolitiCalypso blog. It is called Synoptic Flow. I have imported old entries from the PolitiCalypso blog that are strictly weather-related, and this new blog will contain weather forecasts, commentary on the current weather, historical weather, and general meteorology topics. Posts about global climate change are also there as long as they contain scientific content or references to scientific studies. Please note that anything that does not have actual meteorological content (for example, blog posts about the Katrina recovery, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the politics of cap-and-trade) will still be posted in the PolitiCalypso blog. I have started the Synoptic Flow blog to keep professional blog content entirely separate from blog entries of a more personal nature.

The Super Outbreak of 2011

On April 27, 2011, an historic outbreak of tornadoes occurred over the Deep South. I was there, and one of the four EF-5 tornadoes of that event passed close to where I live. Here are my blog entries about that event.

The Katrina Recovery

You may also be interested in some entries about the Hurricane Katrina recovery from my political/culture blog. These are not meteorological in content, but they relate to the human impacts of a particular weather event.

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